My Name: Matthew Sanborn Smith. My challenge: Write 1000 stories by the time I'm 50 years old. Current story count: 160. Current age: 48. (Yes, I know it will never happen. I push on regardless.)
The One-Thousand is made up of stories that are aimed at publication in professional venues.
I've been published at Tor.com, Nature, and Chizine, among others. Listen to me on the occasional StarShipSofa and every single Beware the Hairy Mango. Shoot me an e-mail at upwithgravity@gmail.com

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

I just saw Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you do so at the earliest opportunity. It will wake up the lazy parts of your mind, which can only be a good thing, in my opinion. Linklater is obviously a big fan of Philip K. Dick as his new film is an adaption of A Scanner Darkly and his character in Waking Life speaks briefly of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (one of the best titles ever conceived). Not only that, but the whole film feels Dickian. There’s a barrage of ideas and the ever-blurred line between reality and non-reality.

I’ve been percolating the idea of a funny novel. I imagine this may come to me in bits and pieces as the future unfolds.

I think that man’s creative nature surpasses his destructive. I think our ever-increasing population is proof of this: we’re making people faster than we’re killing them. Although this scares some people, I see this as a positive thing, a constant reminder that the good in us slightly outweighs the bad. It has to, or else we would have destroyed ourselves tens of thousands of years ago. That’s evolution. As bad as things may seem, keep this in mind. It’s our very nature and the highest thing we can do is to create and to sustain life. Go create art. Or dinner. Or plant a tree. Or plant 20 million trees, like Wangari Maathai. Or raise your kids. Or take care of your parents. Or build a house.

Creation is nothing mystical, we’re doing it constantly, without even thinking about it. If you go to the store and buy a bottle of ketchup, you’ve just created ketchup in your life. No, I know you didn’t make the ketchup (unless you work at the ketchup factory, of course. Then kudos to you.), but you decided you wanted ketchup in your life and you made it happen. Sit down and think about his. This is a god-like power we hold in our hands and in our minds. We have a degree of control over our physical reality that nothing else has. Go create something and consider the divinity in your manifestation of your painting, your company, your relationship, oryour bottle of ketchup.

Most of your mind will have moved on and forgotten this tomorrow, but catch yourself during the day and look around to see what you are creating and remember this. You hold the universe in your hand.